Hamlet

I wouldn’t say it does nothing to increase the price that the book will sell at. There is a vast difference between trusting someone grading their own books judgement ( which is almost always flawed ), and trusting that they didn’t damage or switch books. I trust the vast majority of people I buy from enough to believe they aren’t intentionally cheating me, but I am going to trust CGC’s opinion of a book’s grade a little more than most people selling their own books. Most people ( including myself ) have a very difficult time objectively grading books that they are selling. So I am probably willing to pay a little more for a cracked book with the label than I am for just a plain raw book. I’m not going to pay full slabbed prices, obviously, but I’m going to trust the grade a little more.

So you’re saying my strategy of buying long boxes of books for 3/$1 in the hopes of selling them someday as dollar books is a bad “investing” strategy?

I’ve never really collected slabbed books for the sake of the slab itself, which is really what this is at the core. I was at a comic drek sale today ( 50 cents each or a long box for $100 ), and I noticed they had about 40 copies of X-men 281. They were all nice copies, so I picked out a few and thru them in my box for old times sake, since it was one of the first books I speculated on right before the 90s crash. People will buy that book in 9.8 for say $60, but no one is interested in it unslabbed for 3/$1. I imagine that someone with a good eye could pick a 9.8 candidate out of a stack like that and make a little money. Me, I’m going to stack the ones I bought in my comic book room until I retire. Then I will start selling at local conventions and someone will hopefully pull them out of my dollar box.

I was helping my neighbor price a bunch of comics to sell in his mother’s antique shop and he has the cover ( front and back, loosely attached to each other) and one wrap from Superman 3. Does anyone have even an order of magnitude valuation for something like that? I have no idea what to tell him.

I finally watched this on Disney+ this weekend. I didn’t think this was a good movie at all. It was bogged down with a lot of tedious exposition, and everything else was a worse version of everything we’ve already seen in the 1st two movies ( and all of the other Marvel movies). The jokes were sometimes funny, but less funny than previous movies. The music felt forced. The battles just don’t hold my interest anymore. They are all kind of the same at this point. Honestly, I feel like the Marvel movies have run their course.

That was actually the movie I first thought of after I saw Barbie, for exactly that reason. They didn't play it safe with this movie, and they ended up making something truly new and original out of IP that really doesn't make you think new and original. Barbie is a really good movie. There are a lot of funny jokes, and some of them were there for guys. Even old guys. It opens with a parody of a very old SciFi movie. My 9-year-old daughter didn't get the joke, but the movie didn't require the joke to land for it to work as simple exposition as well. There were tons of things in the movie that were really funny if you caught them, but if you didn't, the movie kept on moving. I'm guessing I missed a bunch of jokes, since I'm not really familiar with Barbie stuff, but there was plenty I did laugh at. It is PG-13, and I was nervous it would be too much for my daughter. She was fine, but she did joke that someone was cutting onions after she cried at a more serious part. The themes of the movie are strong enough to warrant the PG-13 rating. It's not a perfect movie, but if someone made 100 Barbie movies, I bet this one would be in the top two.

I really should have said more like 10 years. Think about the demand and price increases since the beginning of the Marvel movies. The first Iron Man movie came out in 2010. Most key books today are selling for nearly an order of magnitude more than they were before then. If interest wanes to something between the interest in Endgame and the interest in Iron Man, we could see a real ugly move downward in prices, especially for books that are not truly top tier, and are super common. Take a CGC 7.5 Fantastic Four 48. I own that book. I bought it sometime around 2005 ( give or take ) for something like $350. That was a really good deal at the time, but it probably wasn't more than a $500 book. According to GPA, it was about a $1000 book in 2017. At the top of the Covid peak it was over $6000. The last sale was $3600. What has changed since 2017 that would triple the value of this book? Mostly just increased popular demand from the movies. If that demand fades somewhat, I don't see any reason that this book couldn't drop back down to $1200-1500 again. It is a super common book in that grade. Is there a reason that demand for that book will be higher in the future than it was in 2017? I'm not sure that there is.

Yeah, I don't think people have realized that there is a potential for a massive fall in common Marvel keys. We've had an incredible run of sustained, increased interest and demand generated by the Marvel movies. I believe that peaked with Endgame. Some of the new movies are doing well, but they aren't the slam dunk they used to be. I'm actually not bothering to see a pretty large portion of them. If I'm getting tired of comic book movies as a comic guy, I gotta think there is a real danger that the general public moves on to other things, and that Marvel movies end up being a one every couple of years thing at some point, like other franchises. The vast increase in value of these keys over the last 5 years could unwind. Will they? Probably not, but I would include the possibility in the range of outcomes.

That sounds like more work than my model- Buy books that I think are worth $3 out of dollar boxes. Fill my comic book room with them. Make plans to sell them but decide that that is too much work. Repeat over and over. The final step of my plan is to die and have my wife/kids sell everything to someone like you guys for say 50 cents each so that the cycle can repeat.

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The owners of Doll Man #37 are going to be rich when the Doll Girl movie is announced. 😉

People aren’t buying Raboy books because they love the GA characters. They buy them because his covers are some of the best of any age. The supply is tiny. As long as people collect comic books in any form, a small group of them are going to see Raboy covers and say I want to own that. I’m not hating on Hulk 181. I wouldn’t mind owning one. If I really wanted one though, I could just click on one of the 20 or so copies at MCS and it would on the way. There are more copies of Hulk 181 current available at MCS than exist of Master Comics 25 ( graded books only ) Honestly, I would be more worried about demand declining for Hulk 181 than most GA material. GA material doesn’t need much demand, because there is low supply. It can be a totally niche thing, and prices will be fine. SA and BA Marvels require that massive demand to maintain their values. That demand isn’t going away anytime soon, but it may very well have peaked with Avengers:Endgame. It wouldn’t take all that much decline in that demand to make SA Marvels a lot cheaper.

Yes, at nosebleed grades the early Marvels can be challenging, but it’s still much, much easier than most GA books. There are 21 copies of Avengers 9 in 9.4 or better on the census. There are 18 total copies of Master Comics 25 on the census. A 9.4 copy hasn’t even shown up on the census. That is not atypical for the Raboy Masters.

For the most part, people aren’t buying Doll Man #37 because they are looking for Doll Man books. They buy it because it has an awesome cover.

Owning pretty much any SA Marvel in just about any condition is solely about being willing to pony up the money. Some GA books are just plain hard to find in non-trashed condition, especially if you aren’t hooked into the collecting community. Try completing a run of Raboy Masters in 6.0 or better from just auctions and publicly available sales venues. Money isn’t the primary challenge ( although they can be expensive). Just locating the books is the hard part. When that is the case, they move into my “sell last” bucket, because I’m not going to be able to instantly replace it in the next Comiclink auction.

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I want to actually sell a meaningful number of books this year, to fund the purchase side of things. I got the funding part correct last year, but only because an effortless sale of an expensive non-core book in my collection basically came up and bit me on the butt. I need to actually ship a few boxes off to MCS this year. I want to attend some conventions and buy some very cool books at reasonable prices, and some kinda cool books at dirt cheap prices. Since my definition of cool is extremely broad, I’m sure I’ll find a few things to buy.

By keeping my expectations low, I didn’t disappoint.

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Yeah, I’m not a frequent convention goer, but I’m finding fewer books of interest to me in the dollar boxes these days. Pre-Covid, there were little conventions around here that had decent dollar boxes, and even some decent 50 cent boxes. The guy who ran the conventions actually brought a huge amount of drek that he sold 50/$20. It was unbagged, lots of early 90s stuff, but there was also some okay 80s stuff mixed in. When prices on most books got beyond what I was willing to pay a few years ago, I would scratch my collecting itch by spending $20 at his boxes. He hasn’t started them up again here in Minneapolis, I think mostly because he can’t find a room to hold it in at a comfortable price point anymore. I think the price point of even drek may be moving up a little bit 😀

I’ve always assumed that most of the $1 box books at conventions were bought as part of collections where the keys paid for the collection and they were just trying to move the rest as gravy. I don’t think it would make sense to purposely buy dollar books to sell at conventions. Don’t most dealers who buy collections just end up with a bunch of dollar books by accident? Conventions seem like the only outlet for dollar books aside from bulking them out.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/donald-glover-to-star-in-spider-man-movie-hypno-hustler-1235283667/

Fantastic Four 151 VF $9 take